Category Archives: Food

Occasionally it can be fun to be a tourist in your own city. A few months ago, I was given the opportunity to take a tour of the borough I call my home with Slice of Brooklyn, a bus tour of downtown and south Brooklyn complete with stops at two great pizzerias: Grimaldi’s and L&B Spumoni Gardens.

The San Pedro Fish Market got wind of how much I love their Shrimp Tray, and in a wonderful but unnecessary gesture, sent me a bag of their DIY Shrimp Tray, complete with garlic bread, hot sauce and “Secret Recipe Seafood Seasoning.”

Meet Gelati. Silky frozen custard, topped with vibrantly hued Italian ice, topped with another swirl of silky frozen custard. Dip your spoon in and blend. Oh, and don’t let the drool get all over the table.

In Los Angeles, the Wednesday Santa Monica Farmers Market is to foodies what The Ivy is to celebrity hounds. There is no better farmers market in the city, and for Travel + Leisure, perhaps no better market in the country. Big-name chef spottings are practically guaranteed. But celebrity chefs aside, what sets the market apart is the sheer variety.

I don’t claim to be a guacamole expert, or to have some secret recipe passed down to me from a long-lost Mexican grandmother, but I have learned a few tricks that ensure that my guacamole gets devoured at every barbecue and party in about 10 minutes.

Truthfully, I find baseball to be almost mind-numbingly boring. But baseball games themselves are fun, especially when your home team — and I say that loosely, seeing as I don’t care at all about baseball — is the Dodgers and your home stadium is Dodger Stadium, nestled in a palm-tree-lined hillside that perfectly catches the warm southern California breeze.

When a foodie is told the tale of kopi luwak — the coffee brewed from beans that were eaten by a Asian civet, shat out, then collected, cleaned, roasted and sold for $100+ per pound — the foodie invariably asks “how much of an arm, a leg and my first-born child can I spend to sample this rare and exotic treat?”

Sambal. In Bali, most menu translations simply call it “Balinese spicy.” They serve it just about everywhere and with just about everything in Indonesia, along with those ubiquitous shrimp crackers, or krupuk. The recipe is quite simple. Start with chiles. Lots of them.

I can’t quite decide if Jamie Oliver is a media darling or a media whore — is there any sort of media he hasn’t touched? — but I have decided that I like what he’s doing in “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution,” a reality show/documentary about the Naked Chef’s attempts to reform America’s school lunch system and improve our eating habits.

Every once in awhile, I stumble across a smart marketing campaign that deserves mention, and this is one of them: the Pepsi Refresh Project. Pepsi-Cola seems to be on a mission to tame its reputation as a Big Bad High Fructose Corn Syrup Processed Food Product, and started a campaign to give away millions of dollars to fund “great ideas.”

What is the Culture of Comp? Is there a standard of etiquette for comps? Where is the line between freebies and freeloading? What are the expectations between those who comp and those who get comped? Let me share some thoughts with you from a PR perspective.